When I was working for some totally unscrupulous and absolutely soulless non-profit community organizers, I happened to meet a hard working single father who Monsanto sued to keep him from eating the fruits and vegetables he grew in his own backyard.

Geez, maybe I should preface every post like this with how ArenaNet has different teams for different aspects of the game. :\ The people designing town clothes are not the same people responsible for bug fixing and other gameplay issues.

All I want is the one groups of people that is working on designing clothes to work on designing clothes you can wear in combat. Lets call it "armor" for lack of a better term.
I might even go so far as to ask that if new armor is ever introduced, that it be in the form of armor available through gameplay, not through the gemstore or a Lottery Box from the gemstore.

The team working on weapon skins is doing a fantastic job, between Guild Weapons (Which are nicely implemented in the way you get them, guild missions are generally easy, at least to the point where people with access to them can send everyone to one Bounty for personal rewards), Super Weapons (Which allow you to work towards it at a steady rate or get it randomly as a drop, a major improvement on previous methods of acquisition) and the Fused weapons (Which have both a gemstore and lottery box element, but I'm willing to accept that, given the other new weapon types were implemented well. The method of acquisition for these weapons isn't for me, but not everyone has a guild capable of doing missions, and not everyone wants to do Super Adventure Box.)

Since release, the only actual armor I can think of that was introduced has been the Quaggan/charr backpacks, shoulderpads and aquabreather skins from the Lost Shores update, over 5 months ago, and it wasn't even a full set. In the same time, we've gotten the Mad King's town clothes, the witch's outfit, the hoodies, the fancy winter outfit, and now a set of shirts, among dozens of other single piece items.

There are priorities to be had; the team working on weapons realizes more people are going to be out fighting than sitting in town, and as such makes actual weapons sets consistently, not "Ultra April Town Weapons" while whoever makes the clothing seems to have an aversion to helping equip the players where they need it most.

Tl;dr - They need to take the same mindset they have for Weapons and apply it to Armor.

But I know for a fact that GW2 will disappoint most traditional/hardcore gamers, it either doesn't have or severely limits what they are looking for.

It hasn't disappointed me, on the contrary I think its one of the best games I've played in my 30 years of gaming. I've spent close to 400 hours on a single character and have yet to feel bored or find a lack of things to do.

I've found that gamers tend to fall into two categories - 1) those that like engaging in content, and 2) those that like the rewards that come from completing content. I think the game delivers for the first group in spades. The vistas, dynamic events, boss encounters, etc are all well done and I run many of the dungeons multiple times even though I don't need the tokens.

For the second there's not nearly as much to offer. I wouldn't have a problem with expanding the top end, but the issue I have is with gamers who rush through every aspect of the game just to check off a box for a trophy or reward. I always wondered if there was an option in the cash shop that said "for $1 you don't even have to run the daily dungeon, just get the chest and tokens directly!" how many people pay for it.

imho, GW2 is a revolution that did not succeed. It tried to be too different and too many things at once so it collapsed on itself. Many of Anet's ideas for this game have been nice, WvW is nice, Dynamic Events are nice, Hearts are nice, but only in idea, they failed to polish it in implementation and it definitely shows.

GW2's current design is too casual and that will be its downfall, they flattened out the experience curve but the hammer was too big and flattened everything else with it, because GW2 is so easy to get into, it's also easy to finish and be done with.

I'd liken GW2 to a gilded doorknob, it's shiny and nice and rich on the outside, but once you peel back the layer of gold you get something that is plain and dull.

In the end, GW2 will definitely enjoy relative commercial success, after all, the strongest point of this game is PRESENTATION, but the game stretches itself too thin to fulfill the expectations that come with it. Yes, there is a huge market of ultra casual players that could enjoy a game such as this, since depth is not something that casual gamers are looking for. But I know for a fact that GW2 will disappoint most traditional/hardcore gamers, it either doesn't have or severely limits what they are looking for.

When you get old and graduate school and work and pay bills and other such nonsense people over 30 do, it is really hard to enjoy a typical MMO.

GW2 works for me for that reason. My younger self would not have liked it. I agree it is something of a condensed experience but that is perfect tor me. There is really not another MMO I can play that lets me be as competitive as this one because /age just does not matter.

To be honest I so not expect the traditional MMO junkie who places a higher premium on games occupying his time to like it. Ten years ago I would have burned through this thing in 6 weeks. But old fart me loves it despite its warts.

GW2 PvP is an old joke, one that isn't even funny anymore. Just look how little talk there is about it here, that alone is a good indication of its health. It was dead on arrival, stillborn, a resounding failure that strongly contributed to making this game the forgettable flash in a pan that it was. It took about a month before everybody stopped caring about GW2, and the game has had zero publicity since because most people have forgotten that it exists. An utter catastrophe, and I hope for the developers' sake that it was a case of forced premature launch because the only other alternative is collective incompetence. GW2 will go down in history as yet another total failure of an MMORPG, and the only reason its death hasn't been noisier is the absence of a subscription fee, allowing people to simply forget the game ever happened without having to feel like they were scammed month after month until it was pronounced dead. GW2 never stood a chance, having a hilariously bad PvP system and practically no PvE system at all. Maybe if one or the other had been sufficiently developed, there would be some minor hope of revival.

Really? because numbers seem to say otherwise. It sold 2million copies by september, and sold over 3million copies in january. This shows steady growth if nothing else, and numbers comparable to what you see on the list of best selling video games of all time. That's without an Asian release, which is one of the biggest video game markets in the world (for a game who's prodecessor was popular in Asia at that).
You can say what you want about the game being "bad"(which is really subjective in the first place), but saying it was a catastrophy and a failure is just ignorant.

Ignore what Guanglai just said, the thief was my first level 80, and the amount of times I died on that class were so few due to being able to stealth whenever things got hairy to keep myself alive. You have many different ways to access the stealth, three utility skills [IIRC, could be 2], plus a healing skill, cloak and dagger, leap/blast finishers into a smoke field [which the thief has 3 or 4 of these as well], so getting stealth and running away to reset fights where you pull too many is pretty easy to do.

However, the thief is also VERY good for WvW, either might stacking/area healing with cluster bomb spam on the shortbow in zergs, cutting off tailing people in zergs/keeping pug zergs occupied for periods of time trying to kill you, being able to 1v1 most players due to WvW being full of PVE'ers and not PVP'ers.

At the same time however, the ranger is very good in tower/keep defense with the longbow [greatest range in this game, only REALLY rivaled at all by grenade engineer], and trap ranger is very good in small team fights.

At the same time however, don't overlook the elementalist, d/d bunker ele's are crazy to kill, and staff ele's are both great support and can do some good damage in WvW and to groups of mobs while leveling, so don't overlook those at all

Running from fights like a little girl doesn't make you survivable. It just makes you a class that is good at running from fights like a little girl.

I don;t think I liked any of the story. The early levels were okay, not great, but soon undermined as they were left behind. What replaced them wasn't slightly disappointing, it was very disappointing. Nothing short of dreadful could describe it. I never take any alt to claw island as from that point I just can't handle the mind-numb.

And I hated Ttibalt, Cheesy ham-acted banal character that would be a stretch to credibility if GW2 were a 7+ PEGI.

Man I did not know that MERC and ND are made up of serious role players. They are role playing the "Living Story" at the moment. They are running away from their old home (Sea of Sorrows) with refugee camps (Blackgate) as their final destination. Some have made it to safety (Lions Arch at Blackgate) while many are dead face down on ground (those left behind in Sea of Sorrows). You can go loot their body for momento (badge of honor). What makes it so interesting is that Blackgate folks are also roleplaying, helping the Sea of Sorrows refugees by donating then gold. Good Stuff! BG's new WvWvW community puts Tarnished Coast to shame in "Role Playing".

crowea, on 02 March 2013 - 10:55 AM, said:

Happily watching from the sidelines.

How's JQ doing again?

JQ is doing fine. We were outmanned on most maps trying to save our stuff from getting PvDoored by Sea of Sorrows...errr I mean the new Blackgate. The match is 1 week long though, I am sure there will be plenty of twists and turns. Hows your match going on?

Problem with the personal story is that it's mostly quite poorly written and boring. Plus Trahearne is awful. It makes me wonder how they managed to learn nothing from the reaction Kormir's actions got in Nightfall and make the exact same mistakes again with Trahearne.